


will never find safety in numbers

by Yatzuaka



Series: go inbetweens [1]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: A few swears for color, F/M, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-06 14:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15887586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yatzuaka/pseuds/Yatzuaka
Summary: Darcy wanders into the unknown after everything ends. She's not really sure why.





	will never find safety in numbers

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [from distant star to this here bar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12758703) by [wrennette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrennette/pseuds/wrennette). 



> Pulled a bit of inspiration from [Wrennette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrennette/pseuds/wrennette)'s [from distant star to this here bar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12758703)

She didn't want to lose track of time out here amongst the shadows and brightness. She's not sure why it's so important. Her glasses had cracked some interminable measure ago (day 87, her diary never lied. She'd scratched three letters and three periods into a rock-face deep enough that eons would pass before they faded, frustration and anger and terror at being trapped in a circular path clawing at the base of her brain in tandem with the point of her knife) and it wasn't like she could go down to the ophthalmologist she'd frequented since she was still in braces. (Darcy remembers Dr Jeri fondly; she always had a smile, another discount - because Darcy's family was rich in love, not money - and a lollipop.)

It had taken all these nights and days, all the fucking walking, practically Forest Gump-ian, putting one foot in front of the other, to find what she'd looked for. The goggles were old, so old they left some peeling residue on her fingers, but it hardly mattered anymore that something made her dirty. She already was covered in who knew what, and what a salt and sand bath couldn't slough away was there for the foreseeable future. 

That Darcy missed hot, running water went without saying, except it wasn't a simple emotion to ignore, to master. It was a constant longing, a constant ache, but even bathing in a lake or stream was too dangerous to be a serious option. She smelled, in short. And she wasn't likely to not stink at any later point. 

Her goggles were done, at least. They weren't pretty, but they'd last, and better yet they wouldn't fall off her face anymore. There were other small mercies; her solar charger still worked, her phone and ear buds hadn't yet given up the ghost. Her legs still worked, carrying her forward, even if sometimes that meant she went backwards.

(Days 6, 14, 20 and _eighty-seven_ : The Basin, the Central Flux, some awful confluence of paths that drew the unwary traveler. She hated that cave, she hated the remnants of her presence there, she hated the color of the sky outside and the moons that lit up the terrain at night. Darcy knew the taste of that doorway, intersection, spacial anomaly, and would cut off her... pinky, maybe, to avoid it. Something she didn't need to propel herself forward.)

Grandpa Lewis left his crowded Brooklyn tenement in 1940. His name hadn't really been Lewis (it had been Lewinsky, and his brothers who had joined after had mimicked his choice) and he wasn't even 16, but he'd marched out there, ready to meet his death. She carried his picture in a locket, and looked at him frequently. The tilt of his chin, the way his lips pursed, the squint of his eyes as he hid his grin, they were hers as well. He never met his son, but the child had been welcomed into the family. 

Her dad had been an old man by the time Darcy was born (maybe he'd always been an old man, since birth), and he'd died sometime before her fifth birthday. Darcy didn't remember him, and none of the family stories seemed to be about him. Sixty years after his death and Grandpa Lewis eclipsed his son with no problem, because her dad had apparently been a very boring, stuffy man. Darcy had no desire to fade into obscurity like him, but now there was no one left to tell the family stories (remember when Uncle Harry got hammered at cousin Yani's bris and...) over the too-sweet brisket and slightly overcooked egg noodles. 

Darcy wanders for both of them. For all of them, all of her family lost to the moment Jane lost control. The Aether scorched almost everything, almost everywhere and Darcy does not blame Jane, she really doesn't. But she can't - _she can not_ \- pretend with the rest of the foundlings that all was well. She didn't know she could find those brittle, weak spots in the corners and crevices of the worlds with nothing more than the questing tips of her fingers. It serves her well enough, though. 

It's been Queen lately, that serves as her beat, that she scratches into rock and shale to keep the time she almost lost. She'd sing her heart out just for the company except that she was never alone anymore. To think that she'd wanted a pet, longed for a companion of the animal variety, and now she had ... shadows. Blobs of energy and darkness followed her, and she couldn't make herself command them to leave. Not when they ate her songs, made her wanderings quiet to anyone else that could overhear. 

They were the buffer between her and everything else.

They told her of the being following her, though not in so many words, or words at all really. (It was weird and she couldn't describe it, much less explain it.) They watched her scratch her messages to no one, they let her keep her time. And when she captured (tazed) the creature, they hummed around him. (Their harmonies were perfect.)

The handcuffs she didn't remember packing barely fit around the blue wrists, but she felt better to have him restrained. Which said something about her mental state, she was sure. She picked up the melody and sang the high parts with the notes she couldn't precisely hit, but her companions didn't complain. They _adjusted_.

He (and Darcy was just guessing about that based on the physical shape of his body and general facial structures, but she could be wrong) stirred and Darcy moved into his field of view, ready to taze him again if he didn't answer her questions. Channeling a thousand dirty and world-weary action heroes, she let her voice go gruff and her face fall into what she hoped was a menacing mask. 

In the end, she let him go. She was lonely despite the blobs (she needed to give them names, or figure out how to get them to tell her theirs) and something told her that he was, too. Besides he had a nice laugh. A sound that startled her, because she hadn't heard it in such a long time, but god had she missed it. 

Did she invite him to join her? Darcy felt safe enough to take the handcuffs off of him, but traveling with him? She'd have to consider the matter a bit before she made any decisions. 

She looked at him, and he seemed different, smaller maybe? Less blue? She wasn't sure if that was something to be concerned about, or indeed if it was in good taste to notice and ask about it. Darcy touched her tazer through the holster, sliding the guard strap back ever so gently, second guessing her earlier decision to free the person before her. 

The blobs hadn't objected, though, and they were clearly superior judges of character, so. There was that.

She stared some more, pulling the goggles back into position to really get a good look. He was definitely smaller than the giant of a creature she'd tazed a few hours ago. Fuck it. If she offended him, so be it. Planting the palms of her hands on her knees, she leaned towards him, catching his eyes as he brushed crumbs from his cloak. (She had saved those cookies for _months_. Where would she ever get another package of Oreos?)

"What's your deal, dude? What's happening to you?"

He arched an eyebrow, somehow managed to inject a scorching amount of hauteur into the glance.

Matching her tone to his expression, she said, "I'm neither so blind nor unobservant that I would fail to notice that you've shrunk about 6 inches. Maybe more. And maybe it's not my business, but -"

His laugh cuts her off mid-sentence, even though she hadn't said anything particularly funny, not in her opinion. 

"I am Juton, sometimes, and others I'm much like you. It's nothing to be alarmed by," he shot a glance around the perimeter of the camp, as if he knew what, who waited in the shadows. "Not considering the company you keep," he concluded pointedly. 

He stretched out his much smaller hands, as if admiring the play of the dark bleeding into light. He turned eyes no longer red up to hers. They weren't any particular color she could discern, seemingly all pupil and white, and far more disconcerting than the crimson had been. 

"I suppose that my deal, as you called it, is that I'm looking for something," he was much more intimidating, not less, as she would have assumed, the more human he became. 

Her tazer had been recharged, Darcy reminded herself, after she'd taken him down the second time. "Oh yeah?" she tried for nonchalance, and not quite hitting the mark. "What?"

He huffed, a noise that sounded halfway between amusement and annoyance, "Well, I'm not precisely certain about that myself. I suspect that I'll know it when I see it."

**Author's Note:**

> I am stupendously aware of my of WIPs. I could never contain myself.
> 
> I do appreciate you reading!


End file.
